All four elements were happening in equal measure - the cuisine, the wine, the service, and the overall ambience. It taught me that dining could happen at a spiritual level.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Food is one part of the experience. And it has to be somewhere between 50 to 60 percent of the dining experience. But the rest counts as well: The mood, the atmosphere, the music, the feeling, the design, the harmony between what you have on the plate and what surrounds the plate.
As I was growing up, all meals, including breakfast, were family occasions, and you all sat down to eat together - and you had to finish everything as well.
Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one's life.
I realized that food was actually a metaphor for bringing us all together. It's about us communicating and being like family.
Even more importantly, it's wine, food and the arts. Incorporating those three enhances the quality of life.
Author tours used to have a sense of excitement and pleasure, a sense of occasion. I remember stores having a table with wine and food. It was just a real evening.
Shared dining fortifies us.
I think that food ties us to our community and our traditions, and it's the thing that makes us feel good and connected.
The first meal was an object lesson of much variety. My father produced several kinds of food, ready to eat, without any cooking, from little tin cans that had printing all over them.
Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.
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